Dictionary Pronunciation key

The International Phonetic Alphabet as an aid to learning pronunciation is absurd.

I assume you are joking.

"ondule' (ohn-**-lay)"

There is no English way of representing the French "on". There is no English way to write French "**". And "lay" and "lé" are further apart than "high" and "hay" in standard English. What Collins suggests is factually wrong.

I understand your wish that one should have pronunciation guides that most readers can understand, and I admit that that's not the case with IPA. However, as the French use sounds that are never pronounced by an Englishman and vice versa, there is no way of doing it, no matter how many fairies are willing to give you 3 magic wishes.

The real choice is between being accurate or ridiculous.

You would have some sort of a point, if you just had complained about the fact that an English only dictionary used IPA. However, the dictionary shipped with MacOS X is used by Mac-users all over the world, and most of us non native English speakers prefer a neutral well defined method to represent pronunciation in any language.

[ Edited by Apple Discussions Moderator ]

The International Phonetic Alphabet as an aid to learning pronunciation is absurd. For one thing every user must carefully study the IPA to learn how each symbol is pronounced and how it sounds. The alternative is to refer to the key for every word you look up. Lexicographers thought they were making a universal alphabet, but all they did was complicate the whole thing (as in "a camel is a horse designed by a committee.") Talk about clumsy!

Collins dictionaries (British company) always had the best pronunciation guides; they gave a known syllable as an aid. In their French/English dictionary, for example there is, "ondule' (ohn-**-lay)" [In the bracketed pronunciation aid there is an umlaut over the U which is too much trouble to insert right now.]

All of their dictionaries use the same system - syllables well-known to the user in his own language.
I am not sure that they are still using this wonderful system for they were bought out. If not, shame on them.

Tom

All of their dictionaries use the same system - syllables well-known to the user in his own language.

I think the reason more serious reference works prefer the IPA to such systems might be because so called "known syllables" can still have considerably varying pronunciations depending on the region and educational background of the speaker, thus limiting their accuracy.

Tom:
I think that wherever he's from, a person is going to hear and to say those known syllables (as well as everything he hears and says) according to the influences of his local dialect, so they're just as helpful to a man in Texas or Louisiana as they are to a person in Maine or Scotland.
The other corollary is that even if he has spent lots of time learning the IPA he's gonna hear it and say it according to those very same influences, isn't he?

I think that wherever he's from, a person is going to hear and to say those known syllables (as well as everything he hears and says) according to the influences of his local dialect...

The more he does so, the bigger his problems making himself understood at all. I don't want to go off topic with too long an explanation here, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair gives some hints.

even if he has spent lots of time learning the IPA he's gonna hear it and say it according to those very same influences, isn't he?

I don't think so. The IPA is designed to provide an objective representation of speech sounds independent of what the user might normally associate with the characters on the basis of his native language. Another advantage is that its internationally agreed status means you only have to learn one code rather than learn a different one for every dictionary by a different author.

Indeed. See this hint: Fix IPA pronunciations in Dictionary